Vega Tablet Beats Apple and Crunchpad

The Vega, from Converged Devices, wants to be the mythical Apple Tablet, and at first it looks as if it really could be a great alternative to that still non-existent machine, not least because it is actually real.

But dig into the specs and you start to see that this Android-powered (v2) tablet is not much more than a skinny laptop without a keyboard. First, though, the good parts.

The Vega will come in three sizes, 7, 11 and 15-inches, and packs (optional) 2G and 3G cellular radios along with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. You also get an accelerometer, a front-facing 1.3MP camera, an ambient light sensor and a nifty magnetic dock into which the screen sticks and charges.

After that, things go downhill. The 15.6-inch screen has just 1366 x 768 pixels of resolution, less than a comparable notebook (the MacBook Pro’s 15.4-inch screen has 1440 x 900, for example). And that tablet essential, the touch screen, is resistive like the phones of old, and not capacitive like the iPhone. This also means no multi-touch.

Thought that this would make a great travel computer? Think again. The battery lasts just four hours, and that big docking station isn’t going to fit in a laptop bag. And the lack of GPS is a rather odd omission, too. What about a media-center? No again. The built in storage is just 512MB flash memory (plus another 512 megs of RAM for the NVIDIA Tegra chip to use), and you’ll need to add SD cards to add memory (up to 32GB), although a USB hard drive can be hooked up.

So what is it for? The press release makes a lot of the Vega being kitchen-friendly, so we guess that’s it. We hope it’s cheap, though, as a netbook also makes a great kitchen computer, and does a lot more besides. Price and launch will be announced at CES in January 2010.